Romney makes major Super Tuesday ad buy

posted at 10:26 am on January 31, 2008 by Bryan

Just across on Fox and the AP reports too. The ad buy includes California and several other Super Tuesday states.

Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney plans to run a “significant” level of television ads in California and other states that vote Tuesday in essentially a national primary, aides said Thursday, signaling a willingness to aggressively try to derail Republican front-runner John McCain.

Since his defeat in Florida Tuesday, the former Massachusetts governor has been debating over just how much of an effort to make in which of the 21 states that hold primaries and caucuses Tuesday.

I doubt that the ad buy includes broadcasts of the following video, and that’s a shame. Produced by the Romney camp, it gives a look at the inside story of how Romney turned Bain & Co around from a floundering operation that had laid off much of its staff, twice, to a company that’s 15 times larger than it was when Romney took it over. It’s a story that the press isn’t likely to report, so Romney has to pay for its production himself.

I’m sure someone out there will say that Mitt Romney led Bain for profit, not patriotism. But I don’t see why the two have to be mutually exclusive. Neither did Ronald Reagan, for that matter.

Update (AP): I’m glad to see he’s going all in. John Dickerson’s right about his performance at the debate last night, though. I said yesterday he could have captured the base’s imagination by laying Captain Amnesty out. He didn’t:

At the debate Wednesday, the last before the big Super Tuesday vote, the two men bickered over McCain’s misleading characterization of Romney’s view. Romney got quasi-indignant, calling out McCain for twisting his words. He turned to moderator Anderson Cooper to say McCain was making a Washington style attack.

It was a strong rebuttal, but not strong enough. Romney’s opportunity was to go at the central claim of McCain’s candidacy, his boast that he is a straight talker. This would have been like liquid Reagan to the conservative critics who dislike McCain’s positions on immigration, campaign finance, and taxes but are reduced to sputtering by what they see as McCain’s sanctimoniousness. It’s why they derisively call him St. John. If Romney had given voice to their critique by arguing that McCain praises himself for truth-telling while trafficking in a distortion, it would have fired up the waiting armies while simultaneously showing that Romney was one of them. Who cares about his flips and flops, hand me the pitchfork.